Saturday, 25 August 2012

I don't know
what George Orwell would have made of the fact that the outgoing director
general of the BBC apparently vetoed the siting of a proposed statue of him
outside Broadcasting House because he was 'too left wing'. We do know that he
was pretty ambivalent about statues per se.

In his novel Coming
Up for Air, the narrator George Bowling, alluding to the endless tracts of
semi-detached housing built in the 1930s, proposes a statue to 'the god of
building societies'. And in Down and
Out in Paris and London,
Orwell writes about how his Russian friend, Boris, liked dining in a particular
cafe in Montparnasse 'simply because the
statue of Marshal Ney stands outside it' and he liked anything to do with
soldiers.

In Victory Square in
1984, Winston Smith walks past 'the statue of a man on horseback which was
supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell'. And according
to Jeffrey Meyers's biography of Orwell, he was amused by the monument to the
hymn writer, Reginald Heber, bishop of Calcutta.
He told a friend, 'if you are ever near St Paul's
& feel in a gloomy mood, go in & have a look at the statue of the first
Protestant bishop of India,
which will give you a good laugh'.

But I am sure
that Orwell would have approved of the choice of sculptor to make his statue. Martin
Jennings also did the statue of John Betjeman at St Pancras, which has the poet holding his
hat as he gazes up in wonder at the huge span of William Barlow’s train shed,
and it is lovely.

Saturday, 11 August 2012

I really enjoyed James
Attlee's books Isolarion (a journey along Oxford's
Cowley Road)
and Nocturne (a meditation on night and the dark), so I was intrigued to learn
that his current incarnation is as 'writer on the train'. First Great Western
has granted him a pass to its network and permission to talk to its staff, and so
he is currently undertaking hundreds of journeys, seeing what insights he can
gather when 'cut loose from the need to reach my destination as quickly as
possible, on the lookout for unusual stories and destinations'.

Attlee
joins a distinguished tradition of writers reflecting about the state of England
and the meaning of life on trains. Edward Thomas's Adlestrop, of course. Orwell
leaving Wigan in a third-class carriage,
seeing a distraught working-class housewife, poking a blocked drain with a
stick. The ‘frail travelling
coincidence’ of the train journey that inspired Larkin's 'The Whitsun Weddings'.
Or Peter Readings’s long poem, Stet (1986):

'A cooling tower, scrap cars bashed
into cubes,

A preternaturally mauve canal.

… Cropped boys,

Aged about sixteen, manifest
recruits'

Then there is Frances Cornford's
'To a fat woman seen from the train': 'O fat white woman whom nobody loves ...'
- which begs the question, how did she know that nobody loved her?

Sunday, 5 August 2012

A postscript to my post about Voyager 1 and the Pale Blue Dot. I just found this from Ralph Waldo Emerson: 'I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, "This must thou eat." And I ate the world.'

An
afterthought on yesterday's post: motorway poetics is not an entirely new
genre. A couple of years ago Simon Armitage published a chapbook called The
Motorway Service Station as a Destination in its Own Right, which I haven't
managed to get hold of yet. Charles Tomlinson has also written a number of
motorway poems, including this one, 'From the Motorway':

Saturday, 4 August 2012

The poet Andrew Taylor sent me a copy
of In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway, published by his own
imprint, erbecce-press, and edited by him, Alan Corkish and the artist Edward
Chell (who I've written about elsewhere on this blog). There are a couple of
things I've written in there: a piece about the M62 from the New Statesman and
some of my Motorway Twitter poems which I've posted before. But there is lots
of really good new stuff by other people: the architectural critic David
Lawrence on 'the nocturnal geography of the motorway service station'; the
Dickens scholar Malcolm Andrews on the French autoroute and the Picturesque;
and poems by Taylor
and others on the M58, the M62-M57 Interchange and other unlikely objects of
lyricism. I particularly liked the 'Motorway Prayer Poems' by the C of E vicar
and psychogeographer John Davies, now sadly (for us) relocated from Liverpool
to deepest Devon. Here is an extract from 'Prayer in the wind':

Bless all drivers of high-sided
vehicles,

Bless all seagulls blown off course,

Bless all shoppers whose carrier bags
are erratic sails in a bad storm.

Bless those who really are at sea, in
cavernous calamitous waves.

Amen to that. The book, I have just
discovered, was featured on Radio 4's Today programme a couple of weeks ago:

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/joemoransblog